Research interests - Working on developing new methods to combine information from corn, sorghum, and related orphan crops and wild species to identify genetic changes that alter crop traits important to farmers and food traits important to consumers.

The wheat necrotrophic fungal pathogen, Parastagonospora nodorum, secretes effector proteins to manipulate host immunity and promote successful infection.

The slow kinetics and poor substrate specificity of the key photosynthetic CO2-fixing enzyme Rubisco have prompted the repeated evolution of Rubisco containing compartments known as pyrenoids in diverse algal lineages and carboxysomes in prokaryotes.

Bipolaris sorokiniana is a hemibiotrophic pathogen causing spot blotch (SB) and common root rot (CRR) in both wheat and barley, and is causal to significant yield and economic losses.

Prior to the discovery of C4 photosynthesis by Hal Hatch and Roger Slack in 1966 there were clues that some plants partitioned photosynthesis between specific leaf cell types.

Mathematical models of leaf photosynthesis provide a mechanistic base for predicting and assessing changes in photosynthetic CO2 fixation in different environments and provide a means of scaling predictions from leaves to canopies and regions.